Welcome to a new feature on Heavy Blog, “The Anatomy Of”. Taken from the Between The Buried And Me album of the same name — in which the band pays tribute to artists/bands that they feel have most inspired their songwriting — it’s a feature in which we hand off the metaphorical microphone to bands so they can talk about their influences. Read more entries from this series here.
This week in our “Anatomy Of” column, we have the Pittsburgh-based Supervoid! Named after the 1.8 billion light-year-spanning structure, the band is anything but a realm of emptiness. Rife with riffs and packed to the brim with tried-and-true grooves, Supervoid are packing their own special sauce of sludge/stoner boogies with two albums under their collective belt and a third on the way. What exactly are Supervoid giving you aside from a righteous spin on your standard stoner grooves? Well, find out where members of the band came from below, as what you hear in their music may not always reveal where they came from!
Brian (Vocals): This album was a huge inspiration for me. There are plenty of prog rock/metal bands I love (and John picked one of my favs, THE JERK), but I’m a huge fan of peaks and valleys in music and the “ebb and flow” on Protest the Hero‘s Fortress is perfection to me. Rody Walker nails it in all the highs and lows and even some experimental “Mike Patton-esque” delivery, which is something I strive for as well. It’s just something about pushing beyond your range and nailing it that makes it worth putting in your time and effort as a vocalist.
John (Bass): As a bassist, Mastodon‘s Blood Mountain is easily one of my favorite albums ever. It provided big insight into how bass playing can be simultaneously extremely heavy but also melodic and intricate. As a bassist it can be easy to hang back and let the guitars do all the heavy lifting but Troy Sanders really pushes the envelope on this one. His playing makes the songs much more interesting and I’ve always tried to incorporate a bit of that into my music ever since that album came out.
Greg (drums): When I graduated from high school, Clutch‘s Transnational Speedway League album came out and I caught the video for “A Shogun Named Marcus” on Headbanger’s Ball (and I believe this was in that show’s latter dying years) but the song and video stood out to me. It was weird, but heavy and powerful. Well, I got that cassette tape and didn’t totally love the album – it just didn’t grab me as a whole. Fast forward to a couple of years later and my friend had the Clutch self-titled tape in his car. I had lost track of Clutch by then but he was, like, “You gotta check this out, man!” He handed me the tape. I’ll put it this way—he never got that tape back and I ended up wearing it out and buying myself another copy. It didn’t leave my car stereo for a year. What grabbed me was the composition of it all—the stories in those songs and the way they’re seamlessly delivered as a whole. Not to mention I learned how to play ghost notes by listening to Jean Paul Gaster’s drumming over and over and over. I mean, how do you make a bell sound so damn heavy on “The House That Peterbilt”? The vocals are so brash but they perfectly merge with the band’s insanely tight grooves. It’s an amazing album. I hate when people say this…but that album changed my life.It truly did inspire me. I even ended up doing a rad “Elephant Riders” typography book later on in college, haha.
Joe (guitar): I think In Flames‘ The Jester Race was such a big inspiration for me because it was my introduction into European and Scandinavian metal and all the other subgenres that go along with that. I knew bands like Iron Maiden could be melodic, and I knew bands could be super heavy, but this was the first album I heard that combined the two. I still listen to it pretty regularly!
To keep up with Supervoid, you can follow the band on Facebook. More importantly, check ’em out on Bandcamp! Their music is at the very enticing price point of “Pay What You Want,” so feel free to grab it for as little as $FREE.99, but a few dollars here and there certainly won’t hurt!